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The Perfect Photo Suite 6 from onOne Software is a collection of plugins that extend the capabilities of Adobe Photoshop, Photoshop Lightroom, and Apple Aperture. Plugins for precision masking, Lightroom layering, and portrait retouching comprise the most powerful elements of the suite. Photoshop expert and professional photographer Dan Moughamian focuses on the brand-new Perfect Portrait 1 plugin.

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Enhancing Facial Features

The last part of the portrait enhancement process is to use the Facial Features panel in tandem with the Eye Refine Brush and Mouth Refine Brush. Go ahead and zoom in a bit again, open the panel and turn the switch to On. Here again I usually close the other panels (but leave them turned on once settings are applied), so I can focus on the other portrait features. Right away you should notice a change in the clarity of the eyes, the whiteness of the eyes in the appropriate spots (Figure
11), and brighter teeth in many cases.

Figure 11 The initial result (for the eyes) of turning on the Facial Features panel.

The settings in this panel are fairly self-explanatory. For the eyes, the Strength setting is the intensity of the combined effect of the Whitening and Clarity settings. Whitening turns the edges of the eyes more white, while clarity adds that “crisp look” to the center of the eye. Generally what I do is increase the Whitening value between 65 and 75, and I leave the Clarity setting at the default. From there, I boost the Strength until I can start to see small sharpening artifacts; I then reduce it until the artifacts disappear.

I also used the Eye Refine brush to “Paint Out” tiny areas that still looked too crisp (for example, sometimes blood vessels in the eye get sharpened).

For the mouth setting (unless there is a woman with reddish lipstick in the portrait), I turn the Vibrance off as it generally affects only the lips and only when lipstick is applied, according to onOne. From there, it’s a simple matter of increasing the Whitening value based on the individual’s teeth, and boosting the strength a bit (which is often necessary, albeit subjective). The final Facial Features settings and finished portrait are shown in Figure
12 with a split view, so you can see the before-and-after result.

Figure 12 The finished look of the portrait, which took only a few steps and a few minutes to complete.